This development deserves loud applause, for this book is a major work contributing to our understanding not only of free banking, but of banking and money more generally.

(George completed the first draft of this book – which was his dissertation at NYU – when he and I shared an apartment during our first years as young assistant professors at George Mason. I still vividly remember – from 1985 and 1986, a time before it was common to store such documents digitally – the brown box that George used to carry his dissertation. He was very protective of that brown box. Now, just a quarter-century later, the entire contents of what was once housed so carefully in that brown box is available on line, free of charge, the world over. How marvelous!)